Mike Shayne #54 - Armed...Dangerous

Mike Shayne debuted in 1939 with Davis Dresser writing under the pen name Brett Halliday. After Dresser stepped back from the series in 1958, the Brett Halliday name became a house pseudonym shared by several authors, with Robert Terrall eventually emerging as its principal steward. By the time Armed…Dangerous was published in 1966 as the 54th Mike Shayne novel, Terrall had firmly taken control of the series.

This is a weird installment in the series because Mike Shayne’s name doesn’t appear in the novel for the first 40 pages. Instead, it follows a NYC diamond thief named Jake who kills a cop during a heist and takes a hot, French babe named Michele hostage during his getaway.

While hiding out in Michele’s apartment, Jake learns that Michele is a more complicated character than he originally thought, and Jake gets roped into a second, way more lucrative heist as part of a full crew. It feels like a Lionel White or Richard Stark novel at times, with a plunder squad filled with volatile and colorful characters, and there are some amazing twists and turns in the plot that you probably won’t see coming.

By the time Shayne is brought into the case down in Miami, the stakes of Jake’s crime spree become clearer, and the reader is taken on a wild ride best not spoiled here. Just remember, this one is a hardboiled crime novel, not a whodunnit mystery.

As heist novels go, this is pretty good. Having a PI in the mix is also an interesting twist. Shayne does his best to do right by his client while also getting laid (off page) as much as possible. It’s also very much a novel of 1966 with raw racial tension and overt homophobia. These glimpses into America’s unfiltered past are much of the joy of vintage paperbacks. Embrace history.

The novel ends in such a manner that the door is open to a sequel or a continuation story. The author clearly did this deliberately. I don’t know if any of the subsequent novels followed up on this. My impression is that the Mike Shayne books each stood alone. In any case, Armed…Dangerous is one of the good ones. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the installments that has been digitized and reprinted for 21st-century readers. You’ll need to find an old copy HERE.